Memoirs of a chain-shackled student with wandering feet and a wandering mind.

It suddenly dawned on me today that this IS my life.
This IS my life. I have to buy my own food. I have to buy those little cotton pad thinygs to remove my makeup. I have to budget. I have to make sure I get home safe and with my keys. I have to realise that the clothes on my bedroom floor won’t miraculously evaporate off the floor, clean themselves, and then hang themselves back up in my wardrobe. I have to be “responsible” for “my own actions”. I have to get out of bed everyday. I have to keep a nectar card. I have to feed and water myself. I have to remind myself when it’s other people’s birthdays. I have to realise that the people I want, and the people I need, are two separate things. And hell, I’ve got to buy my own lighters! If that’s not rock bottom, I don’t know what is.

My life hit me in this way, all of a sudden, when I was buying bathroom cleaner in Sainsbury’s. Or rather, trying to decide which cleaner is “the best value for my money.” Should I not be doing what other nineteen year olds are doing? Although I suppose student life generally IS what they majority are doing but I can’t help fantasise about the life I could be leading. The life where I breeze past the “household” isle in supermarkets and the two for one offers on shampoo. The life where I don’t consciously have to choose and pick my friends, they’re just the ones who prod me and irritate the fuck out of me in class. I don’t want to have to flick away the flakes and crumbly people who, had we still be in high school, would have remained my idiot annoying friend for the five year haul. I don’t want to have to start analysing ‘serious’ relationships. I want to have fun and when it stops, move on, forget about it! Simple and easy. I should be listening to the manic depressed teens that are my friends, suffering from the catastrophic influence of drugs, alcohol, and sex that is taking it’s toll and likewise laughing it off along with them, prior to parental intervention. Instead, I’m deciding I don’t “need” that “right now.” I’m making decisions about a life I don’t necessarily want right now, or even ever.

I want to really succeed in my life. I want to jump on a plane, right this second! On a plane with only the clothes on my back and the money in my purse. But I’m flung back into reality by the tight grip of my sudden and new ‘responsibilities’ and student budget. I want to travel. I want to tell my kids someday of the adventures and crazy spontaneity of my five year bender. Jobs, university, none of it matters if you aren’t living. I can’t help but feel the pang of mundanity as I sit here, waiting for my nails to dry and dream of the ‘what ifs’ had I chosen a different path. I want to travel the world. I want to write. I want to learn things that I don’t even know exist. I want to do all this, slumming it and having the best damn years of my life and not having a care or responsibility in the world. I want to someday rise to the top, living in a time of revolutionised music while pursuing my dream career. But only after I’ve lived. Isn’t that the point of life? I don’t want a nice house full of nice things with nice kids and a nice family and a nice job. That’s alright for some people, but I want so much more. So, so, much more.

I don’t know if I can take the pain of another two years here. But one thing is for sure, I definitely don’t want to buy bathroom cleaner again.